Topics

This is just a rough list of the remaining tasks that I need to finish in order to get Rockets 2.0 out the door:

- Migrate last author and last post date with script DONE- Update posting page to update last author and last post date, sort forums by last post date DONE- Editing of posts and comments after posting (admins only?) DONE- Create post link for admins on front page DONE- Comics support (as on my home page) DONE- Podcast support (as on my home page) -- Working on this now --- RSS support- Font changes / color changes in CSS in Admin panel (would be neat to have different colors for each tab like Writing Holmes)- Multiple site support (via Apache)- set Apache permissions on .lisp and .db files- testing installation script on bare Linux VM

Some of these will take more time than others, but I'll revisit this thread from time to time to update my progress.

When I started to write Rockets, I had a crazy dream. Then the dream came true, and I didn't know what to do.

The dream of newLISP on Rockets was to produce something unique and interesting, and share it with the world. I wanted to show that you could make a lightweight web framework that could make functional and fast websites with a minimal amount of code. And I wanted to do it with LISP, because I had fallen in love with that language.

I had some experience making websites with the Dragonfly framework, including my own personal site. That framework wasn't being updated any more, though, as the author had moved on to other things. So using Dragonfly as a starting point, I wrote my own framework. It was an intellectual exercise for me, and when it was finished I didn't have much else I wanted to do with it. It was out in the world, and other people could use it for free and add to it or extend it as they wished.

That was five years ago.

Since then, I got a new job where I used Rockets to launch one major internal tool, and prototype others. But the company I worked for was all-in on Python, and so I was strongly encouraged to learn and use that language. There's nothing wrong with Python-- it's a clean and flexible all-purpose language with strong library support and a large community. There is a lot of comfort and safety in Python.

In that time, I've read essay after essay from people who once used LISP to do amazing things and who have all moved on. Paul Graham, after failing to convert the world to his own new Lisp dialect, launched the successful Y Combinator startup incubator. Andy Gavin, who by his own admission was a "diehard LISP advocate" for twenty years, coded Crash Bandicoot and four Jak & Daxter games in his own Game Oriented Object LISP language. Now he codes in Ruby and says that "Libraries and implementation matter a lot. Momentum too." And the author of the Dragonfly framework, after bemoaning that not enough people picked up his object-oriented framework for newLISP, left the language entirely.

And here I was, coding in Python at work and thinking of LISP fondly, like one does of a first love. The years went by and memories got hazier. Was I just going to be the next person in a long line of coders who abandoned LISP?

Surely all these smart people had a point. Why go it alone with LISP when you can use something popular like Python and enjoy tons of libraries and support? Why struggle with something that's so different and unpopular and a bit weird?

But then again, why did all these smart people spend so many years (and even decades) doing exactly that?

In my spare time, I am a science fiction author. I have a new book coming out next year and I needed a website to help market it. I thought about setting up a site on Squarespace (yes, I listen to a lot of podcasts!) It's fast and easy, you can customize it to look like you want and... it would be just like all the other author book websites that nobody reads. I wanted something very different and unique. Something nobody else would have.

And then I thought about Rockets.

Now, I had already partially converted my personal site from Dragonfly to Rockets, but this was just using the new headers and login system, and doing some find-replace on a few functions (you can read about how to do that here: http://newlisponrockets.com/rockets-item.lsp?p=85). Much of the site was a bunch of custom code that just worked for my personal site, and wasn't the same as the site you get from the newLISP on Rockets GitHub repository. So Rockets did some things and my personal blog did some other things, but neither of them did what I wanted from a new website to promote my book. And my personal website was looking a bit old-fashioned anyway, and it was running on an ancient t1.micro instance on AWS that was expensive and barely supported and needed to be moved over to a new instance years ago.

That's when it hit me. I needed a new version of Rockets. One where I could recreate my personal blog and also have a marketing site for my new book, using the same framework. With a simple Apache configuration, Rockets already supports multiple sites-- I have several different sites running on that one AWS instance (see here for how that works: http://newlisponrockets.com/rockets-item.lsp?p=99). But I want a single codebase that can make different-looking sites depending on what you want.

newLISP on Rockets has a few advantages other than uniqueness. It is fast--wickedly fast. And it's simple-- the whole design principle was to make the simplest possible framework for making dynamic websites. What it's missing are features. I had thought that other people would take the basic Rockets framework and add their own features, but I think a lot more people would rather have a simple website with all the basic features ready to go.

To get there will take some time and effort on my part. But I have a good motivation to do so-- my own new website-- and I'm writing out a plan for me to get there. I'm going to make a new thread to report on the work being done. At the end, I hope to launch Rockets 2.0-- a basic but full-featured blog, ready to go, out of the box, batteries included.

It's been a while since I've updated this site, but it's not because I haven't been working on Rockets! In fact, I've been using and improving it at my job, and I'm doing work for not only the 1.0 release but some design work for what I want to see in Rockets 2.0!

In the mean time, I've made a new script that will do all the installation and configuring for Rockets on a bare-bones Ubuntu 14 LTS server. All you have to do is add the "LAMP" stack (and OpenSSH server) at installation time when you're creating your server, then log in via SSH, type

And that's it! It takes care of all the fiddly bits (downloading newlisp, downloading Rockets, getting Bootstrap and the libraries and images, fixing the crypto library, setting permissions, etc) and leaves you with a fully-working Rockets system.

Pre-compiled binaries for newlisp are available for Ubuntu and Debian, but getting a RPM for CentOS is a bit harder. Another option is to compile from source, which is always fun. I tried this recently on CentOS 6.5.

First, get the source. Go to newlisp.org and go to the Downloads page. You will find something that looks like "download from newlisp.org: newLISP v.10.6.0 source". Right click on that link and copy the URL to the clipboard.

Then, from an SSH shell, type

wget <right click to paste the link here>

This will download the source code in tgz format. Unzip it by typing:

tar zxvf newlisp-10.6.0.tgz

Then cd to the new directory. This is where you'll compile and build the source code.

First, however, you will need some essential libraries, and you'll have to add some links so that the makefile knows where to find them.

I've been setting up a lot of new sites lately using newLISP on Rockets. Here's the process for making a brand new site from scratch.

This assumes you've already got Linux and Apache installed on the server. This is easy to do with Ubuntu Server-- just select "LAMP" at install time. All these instructions are for Ubuntu but they should work on other Debian-based Linuxes.

Your web directory should be in /var/www.

1. Install newLISP

NOTE: This is the 32-bit version of newLISP. If you want the 64-bit version, you will need to compile it yourself, or get one of the unsupported 64-bit Debian installers (do a Google search for the most recent version). Also, the version numbers may change in the future-- go to the Downloads page at newlisp.org to get the current version.

Then install it using the following command:

sudo dpkg -i newlisp_10.5.4-1_i386.deb

2. Install SQLite

SQLite is the database used for all permanent storage in newLISP on Rockets. To install it, type:

sudo apt-get install sqlite3

3. (OPTIONAL) Set up a new site in /etc/apache2/sites-available

NOTE: This step is only if you want multiple websites (multiple URLs) on your Ubuntu install. If you don't need this, you still have to edit your /etc/apache2/sites-available/default file and add "+ExecCGI" to the Options line under <Directory /var/www/>

Add a new site file, in this case we're calling it "starscene.net" which is the URL of the new site. Make it look something like this:

7. Run the setup script

If it works, it will ask you for some names and email addresses and such, and then spit out a list that is the first entry in the new database for Rockets, ending in "nil nil)". Don't worry about those nils. They are good nils.

8. Get Bootstrap

NOTE: Rockets uses an older version of Bootstrap. I'm working on updating it to work with the newer version, but for now, use the following tools to grab the CSS

And you should be good to go! Set your DNS to point to the IP of your web server, and Apache will automatically redirect any links to the site to the sub-directory and run index.cgi, which loads Rockets and redirects to rockets-main.lsp, the main page.

Troubleshooting!!!

I get a 'crypto library not found' error!

You have to find the libcrypto library and add it to /usr/share/newlisp/modules.crypto.lsp (See the detailed description above)

Apache just shows the text of the newlisp script, instead of executing it!

You could try adding the line:

AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .lsp

To /etc/apache2/sites-available/default (or instead of default, your site name)

If things really don't want to execute, try this:

cd /var/wwwsudo nano .htaccess

Add the line "Options +ExecCGI"

It works, but I can't write to the database (I can't make any new posts)

Make sure you've set the permissions on DATABASENAME.db (whatever name you gave it at the start). Usually chown www-data *.db works. You may also have to go to /var and type chown www-data www to give permission to the web server to create new files in that directory.

It works, but the front page still shows the "It works but no content has been added yet" page, I have to go to rockets-main.lsp manually

Sometimes the default index.cgi won't execute if you have PHP installed, or if you have index.html already in /var/www. Delete /var/www/index.html and, if necessary, create a new file called index.php that has the following lines:

<?phpecho('Hello');header( 'Location: rockets-main.lsp' );?>

This will redirect the front page of the site to the first page of Rockets.

Any other issues? Post a reply to this thread and I'll try to answer them!
Comments (34)